The Hope Candle
by Mals86
Summary: Paddy Conlon's Christmas is lonely, even as he's inching his way toward that crucial thousand days of sobriety. Some days he struggles. Other days his goal is so close he can almost taste it. Paddy just wants his boys back. (One-shot.)


**A very merry Christmas to you. This one is particularly for my ladies, Wynter S Komen and Nik216, but blessings on you all.**

862 days.

Paddy kept a running count in his head as well as on the calendar in the kitchen. Sometimes the number didn't even matter, and the real value was living every minute sober and aware of the simple pleasures: hot coffee, clean clothes, a sunset. Some days he could only get through by distracting himself from the scarcity and the smallness of those pleasures. The best way he'd found so far to distract himself from all he didn't have were those books on tape. Classics, mostly – he'd worked his way through War and Peace and The Scarlet Letter, and he'd just started Moby Dick, which was a huge honker of a novel. It might even get him through to midsummer.

But today was Christmas Eve, and he needed every one of those 862 days, needed to feel the weight of them underneath him, building him a bridge leading out of the hell his life had become.

He'd finally hit bottom two summers ago. It hadn't been anything so prosaic as wrecking his car or losing his job. Instead, he'd lost the only family he had left. He'd lost his son. He'd lost his patient, stubbornly loving, long-suffering Brendan. Brendan never liked to lose his temper – a characteristic he shared with his mother – but once his anger was roused it was implacable, unappealable. Cold and hard as ice.

And Paddy was out in the cold, utterly alone.

He'd been so shocked when he'd called to make amends and Brendan had laid out the rules for him. "I don't want to see you, Pop. I don't want you around. I can't have you near my family."

"_I'm _your family, son," Paddy had protested, cut to the heart.

"It's not safe for them. I have to protect my wife and my children. You never did that. Ever. And now I see you're never gonna change." All the icy winds of a miserable Pittsburgh winter were in his son's voice, and even from three hundred miles away, Paddy shivered. "You've hurt the people you say you love a million times. I'm done, Pop. I'm done cleaning up after you, I'm done covering for you. I'm done with trying to stand between you and the problems caused by your drinking. I'm done caring."

"I'm sorry," Paddy cried out, fear lancing through his body. Not again, he couldn't lose people he loved again.

"No, Pop. I'm _done._ I swear, if I see you coming around this house, coming around my family with your alcohol and your rage, I will call the cops." The finality in his voice, the certitude, was convincing.

Paddy looked into the future, endless days of grief and loneliness, and whispered to himself, "What'll I do?"

"I don't give a shit," Brendan said. And then he'd sighed, heavily. "No. Pop, if you really need something, you can call me. Or write me. But only if you really _need _something. Are we clear?"

Paddy couldn't speak. Brendan repeated himself, his voice harder. "Are we clear?"

Crystal.

And now it had been almost two and a half years since Paddy's drinking had shattered his last family tie, and every day since then he'd spent trying to clean himself up, trying to make a foundation on which he could stand when he reached out for his family. Every day not drinking, all eight hundred and sixty-two of them, was a plank in the bridge he was building back to Brendan. He'd made himself a promise: he'd earn a thousand days of sobriety before he reached for Brendan again. He'd prove that this time, he was serious about giving up the booze. He'd go see Brendan then. No more sending Christmas and birthday cards in the mail with only the hope that he'd receive a letter back, no more messages left on Brendan's answering machine. Maybe he'd get to see the girls again.

Maybe he'd reach out to Tommy too, when he had that good solid number under his belt. Maybe warm-hearted little Tommy would be able to see the way he'd changed his life, and forgive him. Paddy thought of the feel of Tommy's young shoulders under his hands, thin but alive with muscle, and his chest ached.

Paddy wondered for the hundredth time if Tommy was still in the Corps. Was he deployed? Was he stationed at Camp Pendleton? Was Tommy looking out on a Christmas Eve as gray as the one outside here, or was it sunny in California? Was it hot in the desert, or cold in the mountains?

Paddy had half a mind to call that private investigator back and hire him to locate Tommy. He could afford it; it had been truly surprising to him how fast the money piled up in his bank account, now that he wasn't spending it on the drink. It had been nice to spruce up the living room last summer, when he'd finally seen the dents in the walls and the grungy carpet. He'd picked subdued and manly colors for the room, nothing that reminded him of Mary Frances. No blue and white, no Madonna colors, nothing that would make him think of how badly he'd hurt her and how big a hole there was in the world, with her gone.

Paddy had sent Brendan the results of the PI's investigation: Mary Frances dead and buried in Tacoma, not two years after she'd left him, and little Tommy joined the Marines right out of high school. Paddy had asked for a second set of the documents the PI gave him, and he'd bundled them up and sent them in a big manila envelope to Brendan. Brendan had actually called him then, and Paddy's heart had leaped so high when he heard Brendan's voice on the phone. But Brendan had asked his questions and Paddy had answered them, and that had been the end of the conversation.

Was that all? Brendan had wanted to know. Where was his mother buried? And where was Tommy now, was he married, did he have children, was he still in the Corps?

That's all, Paddy had told him. It was enough for him. It was enough to know that Mary Fran was beyond his reach now, and the only way he could make amends to her was in heaven (which meant that he'd better damn well do some penance, if he wanted to see her). It was enough to know that the Corps was looking after Tommy. Paddy made the mistake of admitting to Brendan that he was pleased about Tommy's career path. "A Marine just like his old man," he'd said to Brendan, sure that Brendan would be as proud as Paddy was. "If anybody was born to be a Marine, it's your brother."

Brendan had immediately hung up without saying goodbye, and Paddy's heart had sunk.

But it _was _a good choice for Tommy, Paddy had reflected many times. He'd always known Tommy would make a good Marine. Tommy had good tolerance for repetition and hard work, and he could follow orders well. Tommy gave his best effort, always. Why, if he was still active, he might even be a sergeant by now.

Paddy came back to the present to wash his supper dishes and straighten up the place. That was another of the small pleasures he valued now, order after years of clutter and mess when Mary Fran wasn't around to redd up the house. He looked around the living room, at all the pictures he'd framed and set up around the room. Even with all the photos, the room seemed bare.

Well, it_ was_ Christmas, but there was nothing in Paddy Conlon's empty house to show how grateful he was for the birth of his Savior. In the lost years, the ones he'd spent deep in the bottle, he hadn't bothered with decorating. Christmas was one more, excruciatingly painful, reminder of how much he'd lost, and he just couldn't bear it.

Even now he thought of those Christmas decorations in boxes in the basement as belonging to Mary Fran. He couldn't look at that corner of the basement without remembering her, happy as a child, pulling strings of lights and crocheted snowflakes and red-and-green tea towels out of those boxes. Mary Frances, with her gray eyes sparkling and her cheeks pink, setting up the crèche on top of the desk.

He suddenly wanted to see those things again – just objects, just stuff, but what a glow of their former owners they carried.

He went down to the basement and opened the boxes, looking for the Nativity set, intending to bring that upstairs. But once he'd gotten into the boxes, he kept finding happy memories in them: Brendan's handprint ornament from kindergarten, the paper-plate Advent wreaths the boys made in Sunday School, the faded I LOV YU POP construction-paper card with Santa and angel stickers and a carefully-printed TOMMY in green crayon on the inside. His mother's favorite fruitcake tin. Mary Fran's Christmas dishes. The electric candle she used to put up in the front window, to welcome the Holy Family.

_I've lost all of them, _he thought. _This is all I have left, photos and memories._ Well, then. If he had to live in the past, he would pick the happy times to remember.

He set up the tree and decorated it with the strings of big colored lights and the ragged tinsel garland. He put the Nativity set on the desk, placing each figure just so. He put the candle in the window and turned it on. Then he sat in his chair and looked at the room, at the ghosts in it.

There was Mary Fran, a baby in one arm and one growing under her apron. There she was in a red dress for Midnight Mass, buttoning little Tommy's coat and making sure Brendan had a hat on. There were the boys, sleepy-eyed and blinking as they watched their mother set the Baby Jesus figure in the middle of the crèche. And there were the boys, eyes shining on Christmas mornings at the gifts under the tree. There was Brendan as a fifth-grader, hanging a pinecone birdseed ornament he'd made in Cub Scouts, and there was nine-year-old Tommy, not to be outdone, running into the room to hang his first Junior Olympics medal on the tree too.

There were all the Christmases Paddy had seen in this house, buzzed or begrudgingly sober. He'd never raised his hand to Mary Frances on Christmas, not that he could recollect, and Christmas Eves had always been a time for his family, back in those days before Mary Fran and Tommy left. He closed his eyes, just for a moment, and he could almost hear their voices.

Then it was time for Mass. He shrugged on his coat and hat and went out to the Olds. She was still running pretty good, and her paintwork was still fresh, but she'd need an oil change soon as the first of the year rolled around. He'd get on it.

He was almost late, and St. Lawrence O'Toole's was full up when he slipped in the door with another straggler. He managed to squeeze into the end of a crowded pew, right before the processional started, and he sat through the Mass with his same ghosts in his head, seeing his wife and his boys at different times over the years. All right, so maybe he _was_ Ebenezer Scrooge, seeing the error of his ways and hoping it wasn't too late.

It couldn't be too late. God wasn't that cruel. So they said at AA, and Paddy had decided to believe it.

This sobriety thing, he needed it so badly. It had to work out. He had to get his sons back. So he went to his meetings and he stayed out of bars and he felt the pain of his past when he could bear it, and he distracted himself with his books on tape when he couldn't bear it anymore. And he counted the days. Eight hundred and sixty-two, thank you Jesus. No, it was Christmas Day now – eight hundred and sixty-_three. _He was one day closer to that crucial thousand days of sobriety.

He watched the Advent candles lit: hope, faith, joy, and love, followed by the Christ candle, light of the world. He listened to the old story again: the journey, the stable, the labor, the baby, the shepherds and angels, the star. He sang the songs and prayed the prayers, and something that was not quite gratitude and not quite fear stirred inside him.

It wasn't until he got home and saw the candle shining in his window that he understood it to be hope.

"Holy Mary," he prayed, kneeling there on the dull brown carpet near the window, "you lost your son. You know that pain. And I've lost not one, but both of my sons. I know I don't deserve your favor… I know it's my fault I've lost them… but please, Mary, let us find our way back to each other. Help me be a worthy father this time. It'll take patience and time, but I love my boys. Open their hearts to me. I'll make you a novena every month so you'll know I mean it. Please, Holy Mother. Bring them back to me."

He wasn't sure, later, how long he knelt in prayer, repeating what even he could see was a selfish plea, but it was a long time. Most of the houses on Hillcrest Street were dark when he finished with an Amen and wiped his eyes. His knees creaked when he stood up.

He stood looking at the candle in the window for a moment longer. Nothing had changed on the surface. He was still an old grunt with busted knees and a weakness for the bottle, he knew that, but something had changed. In his heart, if nowhere else. He felt, somehow,_ answered_. This might be the year that the Conlons would all be together again. "May it be so," he whispered into the early, early Christmas morning. And a benediction fell like snow, peace settled like a warm blanket over him. Hope filled his heart.

Paddy Conlon left the candle burning and went to bed.


End file.
